Annie Doran1880s, michigan, illegalmidwife, 19thcenturyOn July 12, 1889, 24-year-old Annie Doran, from Traverse City, Michigan, was died suddenly in Chicago from an illegal abortion perhaps perpetrated that day. The coroner’s inquest concluded that she had bled to death from an abortion, possibly self-induced.

The crime scene was described in the Homicide in Chicago database as a “Medical facility”, with the additional notes, “Midwife, Abortion place” and “Clinic (e.g. abortion facility)”.

News coverage, however, indicated that a physician, Dr. McMullen, was believed to have provided Annie with abortifacients. However, McMullen indicated that he was in New York attending a medical conference at the time.

Annie’s brother-in-law, a former county sheriff, pushed for an investigation.

Annie had come to Chicago about two weeks earlier, and had asked her sister to accompany her to visit friends in Cadillac, Michigan. They stayed for three days, Annie’s sister said. She’d been unaware that her sister had been pregnant. Mrs. Hansen, who ran the boarding house where Annie died, also said that she’d known nothing about Annie being pregnant.

The database notes that both Annie and the person arrested for her death were white, and that they were not related. The abortionist’s name and profession are not given.

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I have no information on overall maternal mortality, or abortion mortality, in the 19th century. I imagine it can’t be too much different from maternal and abortion mortality at the very beginning of the 20th Century.
Note, please, that with issues such as doctors not using proper aseptic techniques, lack of access to blood transfusions and antibiotics, and overall poor health to begin with, there was likely little difference between the performance of a legal abortion and illegal practice, and the aftercare for either type of abortion was probably equally unlikely to do the woman much, if any, good.
For more on this era, see Abortion Deaths in the 19th Century.
For more on pre-legalization abortion, see The Bad Old Days of Abortion

Sources:

• Homicide in Chicago Interactive
• Chicago Tribune, Jul. 13, 1889
• “Annie Doran’s Death,” Kalamazoo Gazette, Aug. 2, 1889

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